Frau Kolb – Page 13 – TalkingGrid

Posted on July 15, 2013July 18, 2014 by Frau Kolb

A Lamentation for a DEAD BOY

Dear Friends, Family, and OTHERS,

WE have come together on this morning to morn the death of a boy. Yes, he was killed. Yes, he was walking alone. Yes, he had a pack of artificially colored, flavor enhanced, plastic coated candies in hand. He did. He did ALL of the above and NOW he’s DEAD.

Of course, his family are upset. They say it isn’t fair. They cry. They hurt. But, from a certain perspective, BROWN HUMANS serve well for target practice and the fact of killing unarmed brown children is A-OK in THAT twisted context.

NO PROBLEM!

NO ISSUE!

NO JUSTICE!

Ass, you can tell, I’m a little pissed about this latest NEWS story, butt I’m even more pissed to be pissed off angry, dejected, HURT by the NEWS of children dying just because, children killing is OK in video games and we all LOVE a good murder mystery. WE delight in the viscous triumph of GOOD over EVIL. To some people, Zimmerman, was justified in killing a traditional enemy, a pest, before it could grow more powerful and perhaps threaten the existing, “white,” power structure.

Now, I put “white,” in quotations, because I believe it to be a big part of the problem we face is that some people call themselves “white,” whereas others are NOT, “white,” they are sometimes called, “BLACK,” or “RED,” and even, “Yellow,” in the same color-coded system that divides the pie in uneven slices. The function of the feast is to serve KINGS with almost the entire pie and for all the other people to get crumbs. It doesn’t matter your “race,” if you believe this BS you short change yourself because YOU isolate yourself and miss out on all the abundance of universal LOVE and happiness that could be yours and is mine, on occasion.

Even today, as I write this angry letter to NO ONE in particular, I am content enough because I can write, read, and think. Mostly, thanks to my beautiful father, who was once a poor boy, near starving, shining shoes to help feed himself and family, growing up in a famously corrupt colonial power and YET kept afloat by his staunch belief that EVERYTHING was somehow…always, weirdly and wildly… alright.

Forever,

Frau Kolb

Posted on July 14, 2013July 18, 2014 by Frau Kolb

Confusing Puzzle

Ah LIFE!

Everyday, we are invested in figuring it ALL out, Keeping IT together. Sharing our little glued together and framed versions of reality is what keeps us all in business. Right?

Each day we wake up and we have to start all over again, because while we slept the world changed, and everything we thought we knew faded and then its core re-enforced itself and is more the same than EVER! Ah!

Oh Sisyphus, with your heavy load (I once saw a video of a handsome dark plum of manly muscle and masculine appeal lugging a huge tractor trailer tire up countless stairs, get out on the roof of a narrow building and then loop back to the start, at an art gallery in downtown LA.) and tireless strivings… YOU know the drill.

Please don’t spill seven billion (puzzle) pieces, of knowing and being that form a part of my collected experience, onto the red shag carpet in the imaginary living room that is my sweet chocolate mind. If you do, then we will have to pick up all the pieces and find a place for each one. THAT mess would take an eternity to correct!

So… unless you have a spare eternity in your back pocket DO NOT attempt at touching mine.

Thank you,

Frau Kolb

Posted on July 4, 2013July 24, 2014 by Frau Kolb

Dear Paula Deen

I don’t know you. I did not even know of you before last week. Forgive me, but I don’t watch commercial television and I absolutely never would trust a cook that looked like you (overweight, flabby…) to instruct me on any issue related even tangentially to nutrition. In other words, even the junkiest comestible that I might consider ingesting is informed by my concern for the planet and my individual well being. Moreover, it is likely to be the brand of gourmet and/or even organic junk sold at Whole Foods, where I most frequently invest the bulk of my sufficient grocery budget. Anyway, I cook. I cook everyday for my family, because I CARE about FOOD and nutrition. It is a spiritual concern for me. Anyway, Madame Deen, you have become pertinent, timely, of interest, since it became public that YOU casually use the N word with glib innocence of how very BAD a career strategy for a television/celebrity chef purporting to cook Southern FOOD, but actually altering the history of the southern cooking to erase the influence of African cuisine upon the dishes traditionally prepared in the South.

Now, I wouldn’t be writing you a letter IF I had not had the pleasure of reading a letter written by Michael W. Twitty.

I also, by the way took the time to see this nasty little clip where YOU humiliate a man, on camera, in order to “show,” how harmless your verbal whip is.

Paula Deen Defended Souther Atttitude Towards Race In Fall 2012 by Joe Satran for Huffington Post.

Here is an article by Janus Adams, for the Huffington Post, examining both the letter and the incident.

For those of you that need more information about the details of this case: Here is a useful link by Daryl K. Washington for “Black Legal Issues,” on-line.

The evidently brilliant culinary historian, Michael W. Twitty, and Southern Food, expert, eloquently addresses you and the public, with the aplomb and verve of a diplomat, inviting you to the table of reconciliation, forgiveness, and mutual respect. This move, or action, has profoundly impressed me. This letter is a splendid piece of writing, delightful to read. I have rarely read such a moving letter, it is just short of the biblical… anyway… it is amazingly well written and reading it I learned that BBQ is a direct import from the people that were kidnapped and brought in chains like fruit stacked in the bottom of dirty disease ridden ships to the New World, the people that were scattered like seeds across the Atlantic (WHO KNEW?) the people that brought drum music and songs with that beat, the root of ROCK n’ ROLL, WE ALL LOVE.

(Oh, how proud I am that around fifty percent of my blood is of the beautiful ripe plum toned people of mother AFRICA!) I am proud of my color, my heritage, my accent, my good looks, my physical strength, verbal accumen, my English, my Spanish, my colonial past. I am also, like the vast majority of American African people, a mix of human stock. I am Anglo-Celtic (ethnically) and Spanish (language and blood line). I am at ease with being the child of multiple cultures, many peoples, at times enemies, at times best friends, lovers, HUMANS angry and bitter one second and sweet as cherries the next… OH, Paula…. You fat ugly cow! YOU got me thinking! Consider that! I am actually THINKING about YOU! Hah! As a classist elitist ivy-league Manhattanite ART brat, I look down on YOU! Get THAT! I think I am BETTER! (But not really, Paula, I know we know YOU know you are a bigger ass because YOU make tons of money selling your shit and I’m a little independent artist writing this shit for virtually for FREE) Hah! (WE humans LOVE being superior and I’m NO different, really.) NOW: I’m THE ASSHOLE, right?

Anyway, I think… we ALL take turns being assholes no matter how hard some of us try not to be because the price of civilization, thus far is SLAVERY. (Just go ask Plato how he got to The Symposium and he will tell you he was carried through the dirty muddy alleys of Athens via imported SLAVE labor.) Everywhere all over the world there are slaves working, RIGHT NOW to make the crap we buy and throw away without even thinking. YOU see ALL that garbage on the streets? All that shit was once shiny new shit waiting to be bought and discarded. It was made by workers, here with little and elsewhere with virtually NO RIGHTS in far away or “exotic,” places we’d rather forget and therefore don’t even bother thinking about. Tragic. Right?

I am annoyed by so many things, lately… I could go on and on Paula, but I won’t bore you with my superior rant. I will go out and pick up some garbage or play on electric keyboard some scattered lazy music. Or I might go play on Facebook with my fabulous artist friends. I am FREE so I can do whatever I want.

I know Paul that IF you could you’d buy me and my kids and whip us IF we did not dance fast enough at your freakin’ southern wedding.

I’m writing this letter to YOU. I know you will not ever read it. I know even IF did read IT (can you actually read, Dear? IF you can, read some Bell Hooks, why don’t you?) you will NOT get it. I know that you KNOW that I know that WE know that it is a NO KNOW to say the “N,” word, for YOU or ME, ever again. You got that Paula? IF so, get your fat flabby melanin deficient self (I wouldn’t say all this to your diabetic face, butt I know you ain’t gonna be reading this random little web-site read mostly by artists like Terry Amig and other progressive smARTy pants. Hah!) go down, on September 7^th 2013, to Shitoric Stagville, in North Carolina, so you can break some bread with someone that actually would eat with you. I am not sure that I would or could because YOU and I do not have the same diet.

Go cook and eat with a person that is willing to embrace you, forgive you. Please WILL some peace and love between us BLACK (bullshit! skin can be the color of coffee or night butt NEVER actually black) and WHITE (pretty piggy pink, like you or delicious cream like my loving German husband, butt never actually WHITE, call yourself WHITE and know I hear you thinking you are “pure,” like SNOW and that you deserve more cherries in your freakin’ slice of the United States of American pie, which we, actually, ALL bake together every day of every week, in perpetuity). “Cousins,” sisters, twins ONE and ALL in THE Fun-House mirror, of the media where clowns like YOU and… perhaps… me (a little, LIKE you, ain’t I?) are magnified and glorified and turned into people that pay other people’s bills (thanks for paying your “workers,” Paula, unlike your granddaddy).

*Also special thanks to, artist, Dave Stull, for not allowing me to get all high and mighty about myself, ass though I don’t have my own prejudice and nasty side to contend with and, while I’m at it, special thanks to Joseph Campbell, Karl Jung, and YOU for reading this fairly flip and not entirely thought out semi-secret letter to Madame Dean.

**Also, thank you ARTIST BARRY. You got me to pay attention to the Dean debacle.

Yours truly,

Frau Kolb

Posted on May 31, 2013October 21, 2014 by Frau Kolb

ON Skip Snow’s Intervention/Exchange V: OUTSIDE LACMA

Now, in this piece, shot mostly with my iPhone we explore the edge between amateur/outsider and savvy insider. This frequently explored yet rarely documented gray zone demands attention. (The fact that I actually own a tripod and a better camera is made evident in this short digital documentary.) Thank you for viewing.

Last week. Last Tuesday. It feels like ages ago…

31 May 2013

It was the James Turrell exclusive donor opening, elegant guests were dressed in formal attire. Tall skinny European looking models waited to greet invited guests at the entrance to Los Angeles’s most esteemed art venue, the Los Angeles County Museum and we were outside LACMA, rather than inside, sipping Champagne… as we’d been IF we had so desired. Snow, had an invitation, after all. Yet, WE were OUTSIDE LACMA performing our fifth and most singular Intervention/Exchange in Skip Snow’s Art Project. Rather delightfully and in-line with narrative expectations, WE experienced our first BUST. In other words, this was the first Intervention that FAILED to relieve Mr. Snow of all six of his give-away original works of painted art on nicely labeled on stretched linen canvas, (professional gallery paintings, really).

I must admit that I benefitted by the lack of interest in our performance by the few guests that even cast a patronizing glance in our direction, I took home the penultimate painting. I wanted it at first sight. From the start of the evening I had my EYE on Snow’s Hammer. Truth be told: I’d have gladly paid Skip Snow good money for the piece; which is of a portrait of HAMMER with this wonderful digital scroll of binary code wrapped around it like smoke. I LUCKED OUT! I’m pleased as punch because I had my EYE on this piece the moment I saw it. I coveted it for MY (growing) ART COLLECTION!

Anyway… Todd Gray walked away, at THE END before THE END, which is always…a little sad.

Anyway… IT wasn’t an entirely “successful,” evening. Snow had to take one excellent little painting home with him and yet… we did it AGAIN! I collected some quirky and intriguing footage of the almost ideal performance outside LACMA during an exclusive event people by well groomed, the presumably, 1% crowd.

The well coiffed important people in formal attire did NOT bother to entertain SNOW’S sidewalk offer of a FREE painting.

He could NOT give ‘em away. You should have seen, the suspicion with which he was regarded. It was criminal, the way they regarded him as street vermin, and so blatantly mistrustful! Have these art patrons NO INTEREST in street art? It was LIKE we were BEGGARS: Skip Snow, Todd Gray and I. Frau Kolb in a sexy black leather jacket, standing in front of LACMA being pathetic and BEGGIN’ for attention, faithfully documenting the sweet people that went out of their way to show support to our creative collaboration. It was so sad. SO SAD! HEART WRENCHING! And yet… inspiring. AH! I’m so glad Snow invited me to document his work. It is a pleasure to behold the unfolding of this series of explorations of context and value, identity and worth. Excellent, really.

However, we will recover. ONE thing about us here at the TALKINGGRID is that we are quick to bounce BACK! WE are ready to move forward with the project, as we set our sights on our next and final target. Where will it be? Where will Skip Snow’s ART PROJECT Intervention/Exchange VI take us?

Well… hold ON TIGHT and stay tuned for more on the adventures of artist Skip Snow, Frau Kolb, and Todd Gray’s collaborative miracle, the ONE and ONLY, SKIP SNOW’s Intervention/Exchange Art Project 2013.

Much LOVE,

Frau Kolb

Posted on May 18, 2013July 18, 2014 by Frau Kolb

Intro to a Muse, Timetraveler and More

LOOK at ART! EAT. Drink. CHAT! You can put it on my menu daily and I’d never tire of this combination. I love to drink and eat around art adventure! I love meeting up with amazing humans. THE MUSE, is a prime example. She is a unearthly beauty that motivates and inspires mere mortals, like me, to write, to think, and to plan(!) ways in which to celebrate her being so inspiring. WE have a established a nice pattern of visiting museums restaurants, drinking copious amounts of excellent wine, and seeing great art, together.

Ah! Friendship IS the fountain of youthful pursuits…

I also had the pleasure of lunching with Mr. Ed Valfrey, artist, musician, tickler of words, tweaker of meaning, experienced TIME TRAVELER, not too long ago. His mind expanding blog, rich with the spacey perfect dune-spice, dreamy-concrete, specific and effortless freshness that we ALL aspire to being proficient in the language of light and the mysteries of transcendental realist photography. His work, I recommend you explore.

A week or two ago, artist Dee Shapiro and I met up for lunch at the Hammer museum. She is a recognized visual voice, in particular her work with wave patters with the golden… you know… secret number… the one found in waves and stock market charts and graphs. She and I locked in for an immediate CLICK. WE connected, completely over lovely salads and gentle service. WE spoke of our lives and opened for ourselves a future of such sweet meetings for lunch in museums scattered around this beautiful life sustaining planet. I can not think of anything more delightful.

Posted on May 17, 2013March 1, 2015 by Frau Kolb

Spring Clean at Casa KOLB!

17 May 2013

Los Angeles California

“Spring Clean in LA,” © Frau Kolb 2013

Yes it is true that I HATE to clean. I get angry, very angry, when I clean. I get mean. I am vicious. Merciless. Ruthless in my aspirations to perfection! I do not relent until das HAUS sparkles!

I mean it.

My anti-intellectual Jehovah Witness mother LOVES to clean. She loves nothing more than to disinfect and purify in flowing waters all manner of apparatus. “MY, my!” Said my German boyfriend then (husband NOW), “Your mother’s house is super clean,” the first time he visited. Typical of my husband is to be spot ON! 100% correct in his observations. Unlike the others he wastes not time talking trash.

“Why do YOU TWO have so many books???” She would whine, complaining of my father (a resolute intellectual, proud of his learning, immersed in aquiring more and young attorney in Dominican Republic when they met and I his offspring, a chip off the old mahogany, a little NEW YORKER book-reading fast talking bike riding brat). “They get so dusty!” She would moan as she wiped the books with moist cloth towels. She did all the washing by hand. She care(s)d about, “the environment.” She hand NO THING better to do than WASHING. She certainly did NOT read.

Except for the FREE literature from the Jehovah Witness’s and nutrition books. MOM was a health NUT. Thank goodness! She taught me how to eat right and without that knowledge I would not be beautiful svelte ME. [Thank you, Mommy, for being so clean (which impressed my husband) and taking good care of me. Thank you for NEVER feeding me canned crap or frozen dinners.] A pseudo yet passionate vegetarian she used to call the meat section in the super market, “THE MORGUE.”

From an early age, I collected paper and books. I love paper. All kinds of P A P E R! Handmade, however is my very special favorite. I love libraries. I live for both… somehow. I write in journals. I have all my life. So… I have boxes and boxes of boxes I have written and books I have bought. Books I have read and books I intend to read. I have collected books my whole life. Books are my grounding sanctuary. I feed my spirit by reading. I even read TONS of self help and spirituality books which have helped me figure out a style of being that WORKS for me. I call it, “The Vacation Approach.” It is how I live my LIFE.

YET… For over two years I had my books in boxes. Fearing that we would have to move away from our happy home in Los Angeles. Yet, it turns out that somehow my loving husband’s first promise of “California,” keeps proving to be the golden truth of our LIFE story. Anyway… last week, I took the books out of the boxes and seeing them AGAIN is like being born again from a deadly slumber.

Ah! The number of ordeals… the PA I N! The Heartache! I’ve had so many crash and BANG bad times with people in the last few years… IF the core of my LIFE were not LOVE I’d lose faith. Fortunately… I have my dear old friend, my true LOVER and Partner in LIFE and Marriage, MY BIGGNESS. Hartmuth Kolb is steadfast and true. WE fit together like puzzle pieces. He likes my books and appreciates that I am always reading. NOW in this tower of printed pages I have my home, where I cultivate peace decorated with the fruits of LOVE harvest over many a year and preserved with care as a sanctuary from the noisy world of NEWS and life and filled with wonderful books brimming with adventure.

IF you have been putting off Spring Cleaning, taking care of domestic chores. S T O P!

It is time to get your books out of boxes and remember what you are made of.

Warm regards,

Frau Kolb

Posted on May 2, 2013July 18, 2014 by Frau Kolb — 1 Comment

On the Way Back to LA

Playa del Rey, California

2 May 2013

Try this next time you have a flight pending:

Go to a great restaurant and order yourself a great meal. Eat it. In the ideal restaurant, the meal is enormous. It is meant to fill you up with raw pleasure MORE than once.

The steak from Smith and Wollenski’s in Philadelphia made my flight home heavenly, ease. Yeah. Yes the porterhouse steak for two, was that good. The service, Fabian, was perfect: professional, earnest, and prompt. This location, over looking Rittenhouse Square is date worthy.

The cherry blossoms in ripe fullness of SPRING! The image of joy on my husband’s face as he sipped his glass of a bold deep red with hints of pepper and chocolate. YUM!

Or was it the memories of happy shopping in Philadelphia that make so happy on the flight home, back to LA?

In just 24 hours, I accomplished SO MUCH!

Thank you, Macy’s in downtown Philadelphia for the tremendous service. Specifically, Nicklaus was amazing. He was the paradigm of sales virtue helping me earnestly to collect the objects that will buffer my soul and comfort my body. His friendly, focused service made it possible for me to achieve the (almost) impossible mission I’d set before myself: create a wonderful HOME, a retreat, a secret sanctuary for my loving husband, for myself, and the kids.

HOME: a place to return to. It is the place where you base yourself. It is from where you grow and expanding reaching out to the dazzling universe with ever changing interests and goals. It is where your books are waiting for you to read them. It is where your clothing hangs. It is your nest, your hide-out. It is where you charge your batteries. It is where you hang out in your underware and eat cereal in bed. Home is more than an address, a roof, a fridge, and a shower stall. Home is one’s own private paradise, a Utopian kingdom, a perfect cubby for the brain and body. At BEST, home is sacred territory and must be treated as such.

I stormed through the store and purchased all the required elements for a domestic paradise. Breifly I was stranded, not trusting the rude boys that showed up to help me based upon my (BAD) Craigslist search for HELP transporting all my new treasures “back to the ranch.” Thanks to Über, a marvelous on-line, app-based service, I was able to use my iPhone and call for a car, an SUV truck, in disco black and equipped with party lights and booze (I did not indulge, this time) precisely when I needed one. WHAT A WONDROUS AGE we live in!

Exactly then LIKE a bling BLING BLACK man-knight-giant: Emmanuel C. came to my rescue. He is a hyper street smart, super ghetto fabulous, savvy, entrepreneur and business-man TAXI driver. He had, “no problem,” helping me to get my many new housewares back to the NEW HOME, a little rental somewhere in Philadelphia. He also recommended the precisely right furniture store.

AGAIN, I blitzed in and got the goods. Tamara, the saleswoman there really went out of her way to help me get the most comfortable and lovely home furnishings IMMEDIATELY. Would you believe that we arranged for delivery THAT VERY SAME NIGHT???

Yes, it is true. We did. Thus, after eleven pm the movers arrived and they delivered and installed everything before midnight. I was just about to turn into a pumpkin when WHAM! They were GONE! Presto. I had a room full of new furnishings. Amazing.

This morning, after a few important meetings, I went back to Macy’s where I dropped more cash on ideal home-wares, getting the final needed nothings, the little tools of the kitchen, porcelains, high thread count cotton sheets, and other everyday marvels that will make our world a cozy place. Based on the series of successful visits, starting with the first one, in the shoe department… on another visit to marvelous Philadelphia… (I’d popped into the crowded shoe department and the saleswoman was so patient and understanding of my skinny feet. She got me pair after pair of shoes until we found a pair I love. She persisted. She endured, like Nicklaus. He also gave of himself. Thus making my frenzied shopping extravaganza a productive and worth mentioning experience.

The sum of my growing experience of life in Philadelphia is that it is a city one can proudly call, “HOME!”

By the way, IF I’d have another day in Philadelphia there is no way I’d miss the OUTSIDER ART Exhibit.

And YOU know how much I crave dancing with the BRIDE.

(I’d LOVE to get nude and MOVE it around Duchamp’s cracked masterpiece…

Butt, that is another story… Hah!)

Love,

Frau

Posted on March 20, 2013July 18, 2014 by Frau Kolb

Ola Mañana

Jennifer Wynne Reeves @ BravinLee Programs subjective review of The Worms in the Walls at Mondrian’s House.By Ola Manana

I walked into Bravin Lee Programs on the Saturday of the Art Fairs. Lucky for me, the room was quiet, and uninhabited, except for the co-owner John Lee,who was manning the desk at the entrance. The quiet provided the intimacy required to fully appreciate the astonishing work on display.

Every single work had the completeness of a song. The songs were strange. Prominent passages were as felt as a long note, rose and fell within the piece. Gradations of subtle midnight blues and blacks striated and streaked, dipped and peaked. Wires wove in. Whites whited out. Tiny animals popped up like groupings of notes. Sometimes, instead of animals, curious geometric figures appeared.

Far Away But Not Far Apart, 2013, 15 x 23 inches

In FAR AWAY BUT NOT FAR APART, two of these figures interact. One is a swash of black, white and phylocyanine green that peeps from the foreground. He is a wide brush stroke waving with something like a symbolic wire arm to another abstract guy made of white blobs stacked on top of one another like a skinny six ball snow man. The mood is ominous. The washy sky suggests a coming thunderstorm.The bridge, overtaking the central plain contains the white figure who looms above and at a distance from his tri-colored friend. An occasional wire is woven through the grid.The fragile reminder of metal deepens the surface both piercing it and hovering above it. The puncturing enlarges the depth behind the artwork and makes it larger. Instead of being cute,which is the danger with small colorful paintings of deluxe stick figures, it is more than that.It is heartbreaking because you know the snow guy can’t get to the color guy. Tiny, jubilant “arms” are raised in recognition of copacetic understanding. It is a memory of a time when the going was tough and a comrade waved friendship. Acknowledgement. Maybe even love. And that wave was enough.

Laughing at Snakes 2011 to 2013, acrylic, old frame and wire on panel, 32 x 11.5inches

Many of these paintings seem to be pretending to be paintings about painting. In UNEXPECTED BOOGIE WOOGIE, a poetic ode to abstraction is neatly penciled onto the painting. The painting is stuck flat in an ornately carved wooden frame that was whitewashed, along with the cardboard. Midway through the poem Reeves writes –“Jazz needs heat. Jazz has jaws.” It seems that the artist is using language in the same experimental way that she uses the material elements in her work. There is a rise, a fall, a web, a wire, a drip. The painting is surreal. Her ode to abstraction does not belong ON an abstract painting. She’s obliterated the lovely frame, yet included it. A pile of what appears to be empty lollipop sticks is stuck with dribbles of goldy brown resin to the “gutter” between cardboard and frame . The resin suggests melted candy that has been sucked off, spit out, and then stretched into the triangle on the left upper corner. Most unexpectedly, two hooks opposite each other are cranked into the front of the painting. A wire attached to each hook forms a vertical line. The tension between abstraction and figuration is stated implicitly in the poem. But I think it is just there to throw the viewer. Disinformation distracts from the trail of candy drool, the surreal symbols and whatever they mean.

Laughing at Snakes 2011 to 2013, crylic, old frame and wire on panel, 32 x 11.5 inches

Ms. Reeves paints like the memory of a dream. There is a constant interplay between vague and recognizable elements. She tricks or treats you with her surfaces. She’s the type that can’t be typed, the nut that can’t be cracked. She reveals and obscures vigorously and what is left is the interplay between doubt and conjecture, scribbling out and scribbling in.

In LAUGHING AT SNAKES, it seems as if her painting is threatening to burst into SCULPTURE. Again she makes use of a frame, as part of the painting itself, but does not even bother to fill the painting in. Instead, it appears Reeves has dripped pools of peachy paint on a surface, left them to dry and pulled up the creamy plastic shapes and arranged them just so in and around the frame. Nothing else is left to chance, its the collecting nesting bit of a busy pack rat. Not even the wire the piece is hanging from is left to chance. Instead of a utilitarian hanging purpose, this wire is festooned like a party hat upon the painting. There is something funny about it. It’s make believe second shift surrealism. Meaning is alluded to through abstraction. For me, the painting has anthropomorphized. It is flesh and skin. It’s the guy at the party that’s all fucked up with leis and crepe paper trailing behind him. No one wants to be him, but he doesn’t exactly want to be you, either.

I am enjoying my walk around the room. I like that I can’t figure out what Ms. Reeves is doing. What “school” she is participating in. I like that her paintings are stories about life and then stories about art. She’s obviously aware of the art historical context of her work. She knows of Eva Hesse, and Rauschenberg, and Beatrix Potter for that matter. None of these possible influences seem to have a hierarchy for her. If there is precedent to the articulation of paint, the type of stroke or family of color it has all gone through the Reeves wringer, and come out entirely hers. There is a story here. In fact there is a book attached to this body of work. A book of vignettes of perfect prose that seems to reflect the temperature of the paintings.

Bird Healer, 2012, gouache, wire pencil and hair on hard molding paste on paper, 12 x 15.5 inches

In BIRD HEALER, I am transported by a wild country scene. Baby blue, turquoise, and hurricane pink form the backdrop of the narrative. A couple of rifles have fired on a group of birds. Someone’s out hunting. A blast of powder blue feathers? smoke? rises in a frenzy to mingle with a cloud formation. A bird has been shot, midair. Another is hurrying away, but looking back. Schadenfreude. There is a dead one lying on the ground, and another wreath of limp feathers draped around the hand of what is apparently the Bird Healer. All of the drama is happening with the birds. The geese with their sketchy simplicity all have their row to hoe now. It is a time where everyone is in danger. The killing and the healing are happening at once. The healer stands melting in and out of the color fields. She is pink to cobalt violet, tall in relation to the scene. She can not be hurt by the bullets whizzing by. Instead she has become part smoke herself, a tottering stack of blocks that relies upon her own unbelievable form to weather life’s trials. She alone has bothered to retrieve the injured one. She’s barely a huddle of lines this one. But there’s hope. Amid all the action there is silence. The end of the story is suspended like the bird stranded, mid air. And I am left to do what humans do : fill in all the blanks so I can understand.

I can’t be sure if my story and the artist’s story go together. It is within the realm of possibility that the fantasies constructed from a tiny pile of hair, a button, a blob of paint that has been placed like a wad of gum, all of the stories I attach to the art are coming from me and have no bearing on the artist’s intent.

And that is why this work works for me. When I go inside it, enough room has been left for me to walk around and take what I need, as a viewer. In that way the work has succeeded by being both personal and universal. Specific but not didactic. Jennifer Wynne Reeves has suspended my disbelief in the rainbow stick figure. And I can imagine, he’s waving at me.

Posted on July 15, 2012July 18, 2014 by Frau Kolb

The Homoerotic: WANT!

Summer 2012: ART in Culver City, Los Angeles

What is Cooking: Hot Art in Los Angeles 2012,

La Cienega Blvd, art galleries

The desire to own a work of art may fuel the hungry look of gaping gallery goers or, more likely, the pretentious wish to be perceived among arbiters of good taste and the sophisticated rich, that can afford to adorn their world with coveted visual art trophies, may be behind the drive moving the hordes that stroll with famished faces, apparently seeking sustenance among the works of art on display for select consumption and public discussion. Last night, on La Cienega Blvd., an exhibition of exhibitionist’s (homo)sexual Odyssey, Walt Cessna, “I Fukt LA,” was explicit to the point of perhaps warranting the question, “What is this other than pornographic visual assault? Gratuitous obscenity?” The image of the young man contorted, pretzel shape, as to display his genitals, along with a wide Cheshire cat smile under a prodigious pair of black spectacles, defiant in its flagrant disregard of conventional appetites, is a perfect example of a homoerotic stance which is apparently at odds with the mainstream power structure, yet perfectly palatable to the requirements of the relentless male gaze. The photographic work by Cessna at, leaves nothing to the imagination.

The perspective of desire, the will to OWN, to control is all persuasive and in a capitalist society, the reason behind most if not all “legitimate,” transactions and interactions. The exchange of one currency for another written in paint or printed photographic records of an adventurist sexual explorer’s exploits, allows for the hunger for beautiful boy flesh to be fanned via visual art, stimulus that is not without a dash of political spice, as we embrace gay marriage and the rights of homosexuals are hotly debated and increasingly upheld by law and public opinion.

The notion of display is inherent in art and in sexual selection. Just as, an art work “ON SHOW,” is (almost) always for sale. The sale, may be private, just as the consummation of desire is (usually) private. Yet the prelude to this “climax,” is conducted in the public forum, much like the promenade or boardwalk where prostitutes peddle their wares. Yet, the artists responsible for the works in question are, surely, not prostitutes despite the highly erotic nature of the artwork on display. The defiance of “Daddy,” is part of the visceral bite and significance animating various homo-confrontational art efforts. These works are in opposition to those that seek to sublimate or subdue the homosexual urge and drive to expression in sexual action and possible lifestyle choices.

Yet this positive affirmation of sexually is restricted to a vision, which caters to the same old patriarchal eye. There are no portraits of older men displaying their withered wares. The man depicted from behind perched on a table laden with ceramic ware, pottery, crafted molded like his body to appeal, to be used. In contrast to the brazen, in-your-face proposition of “Heywood Wakerfield Drop Leaf Extension Table with Dinnerware,” by the Brett Reichman painting, exhibited at Angles Gallery, and pictured here being examined by a very interested woman, the sculpted body, clad in fishnet, of a black man, is compelling for its frank equation between, “the catch-of-the-day,” mentality of a hungry sailor on the prowl for authentic experience of The Ultimate Sexual Odyssey, this image is erotic, rather than pornographic, or sexually explicit, and that restraint is part of its considerable allure and demonstrates that Cessna is capable of photographic or narrative restraint in his recordings.

Yet, restraint is not what distinguishes Marcelino Goncalves painting, “Feeling Feline,” at Angels Gallery, but rather a luscious sensibility and classical focus on form and a palatable, domestic, safe representation of a young male sex object, a subtly sumptuous work of art, sensitively painted painting of a young man, with generous mustache, spread out on a fresh clean bed with striped pink sheets. “Feeling Feline,” is a seductive painting. One could live with it, regardless of sexual orientation or fleshy desires. An abstract painter’s interest in pattern and color define the painting’s delicious gold-green (chartreuse?) background and sweet zig-zags of the floor boards. The work is a gentle tour of classical painterly interests; the strong and bright daylight, streaming in, the idealize flesh: plump and warm, inviting to the eye, pink and frankly pretty. The object of desire a dark haired young man, with tanned smooth skin, thick mustache, ample chest hair, the curl of his armpit hair, all rendered with meticulous and yet light hand. The kitty at the center, so precisely rendered and purr-fectly pretty, looking out at the viewer, inviting a friendly hand, a caress… Ah!

For some, desire manifests as lust for variations on the Apollonian ideal, for others the WANT is for young lovers with silky hair and marble skin, others prefer paintings as their prizes, with which they trumpet their own prowess, as connoisseurs of the comely, the courageous, and the coveted. The shape and color, the weight and heft, of WANT may vary, but desire is a universal experience to which we can all relate. The art collector craves that final piece which will complete his or her (unending) collection. The artist craves attention and recognition for skills honed, insights captured. The public devours a savory visual feast presented by savvy art galleries, quick to capitalize on the market for masturbatory masterpieces, staunch purveyors of “good taste,” although the recipe for provocative, culturally relevant art, changes from season to season.